Bill Simmons is best known as a sports writer and talking head, but he's also somewhat of a media mogul. He has a deep understanding of content, social media and audience-development. His most recent podcast guest was Ben Thompson, author of the Stratechery and one of the most highly respected tech analysts in the world.

You and Larry David wrote Seinfeld together, without a traditional writers’ room, and burnout was one reason you stopped. Was there a more sustainable way to do it? Could McKinsey or someone have helped you find a better model?

Who’s McKinsey?

It’s a consulting firm.

Are they funny?

No.

Then I don’t need them. If you’re efficient, you’re doing it the wrong way. The right way is the hard way. The show was successful because I micromanaged it—every word, every line, every take, every edit, every casting. That’s my way of life.

So if you can identify, let’s say, three to five use cases for your product or five to 10 problems people hire your product to solve, that’s it. That’s your whole content strategy. And you can write really interesting, in-depth articles specifically about those topics.

That opens up new doors when you have a positive constraint — you’re only going to write about these 10 topics, so what are some new and interesting ways to do that? When you have a smaller amount of content to create, you can approach it from a lot of different angles.